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Why We Have More Sympathy for Baby Jessica Than for Darfur

Focusing on the struggles of an individual appeals to our emotions and makes us care. As the numbers of people suffering get bigger, our cognition, calculation, and thoughtfulness are activated—and we care less.

In addition, Dan is a visiting professor in MIT’s Program in Media Arts and Sciences. He is currently working on a new book titled Dining Without Crumbs: The Art of Eating Over the Sink.

Transcript

Question: Why do we have more sympathy for individual people
suffering than for large masses of people suffering?

Dan Ariely: This is you can think of as the Baby Jessica,
when Baby Jessica fell to the well and she really suffered and her
parents must have been incredibly miserable, she got more CNN coverage
than Rwanda and Darfur, right? And the question is, why does this
happen and why do people care so much? And it turns out, there’s
research on what’s called the "identifiable victim effect." And the
question is, if you have how many lives are at stake and how much do we
care, you would expect it as more lives are at stake, we would care
more, maybe in a linear relationship. Or maybe we would care more in
the beginning and there’ll be kind of a diminishing return, like we
wouldn’t care if it’s 100 or 1,000, but we care a lot at the bottom
range.

But it turns out, the function is different. We care a
lot about individual life and care less and less as the pie... as the
number of people become bigger. And this goes to kind of an observation
of both Stalin and Mother Theresa said... you know, Stalin said, "One
death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." And Mother
Theresa said in the same spirit, "If I look at the masses, I will never
act; if I look at the one, I will." And both of them basically
portrayed this idea that what happened when we kind of think about
recruiting ourselves to act against something, it’s not about our mind
thinking, it’s not about the cold calculated thought about what’s
worthwhile and what’s the cost/benefit analysis; it’s about our heart.
It’s about our emotions.

And the question is, what can activate
emotion? It turns out that an individual case can get us to care versus
a big set of cases just becomes statistics. So this beautiful result
by Deb Small and George Lowenstein and Paul Slovic that basically says,
“Here is one girl in Africa who is hungry, how much money would you give
her?” And then to other people they say, "Here’s the problem of hunger
in Africa, there are 3 million kids in Sudan and there are 5 million
kids here, and this, how much money would you give?" And people give
half as much to Africa than they give to the single girl, Rokia. It
actually gets worse. Because, it said, if people give more when it’s
emotional than when its statistical, what happens when we give both
information. We say, “Hey, here’s one girl, Rokia, see how sad she is
and how much money could help her. By the way, there’s 5 million more
like her,” what would happen? It goes down.

It turns out that
every time you activate cognition, calculation, thoughtfulness, you turn
off the emotion—people care less and give much less. And of course,
this explains a little bit, the kind of imbalance between what we give
to and what we don’t give to. So think about how difficult it is to get
money for prevention of diseases; prevention of malaria or prevention
of diarrhea, or de-worming kids in the world. You know, lots of kids
have worms. It turns out that those things are incredibly important,
incredibly useful, you can actually get people to be much, much
healthier, but it’s not motivating, right? De-worming a kid, or, you
know, a million kids in India, just doesn’t make you feel warm and
fuzzy. Or preventing kids in the future from getting malaria is again,
not that exciting. But if you can help one person, specific, concrete,
get something, we all get very excited from it. So there is a real
imbalance between what really matters and what we care about and what we
give our time and money to.
Question: How can charitable groups use this information to their
advantage?

Dan Ariely: If you run a not-for-profit, of course, you
want to build on this irrationalities because you care about your
not-for-profit, and I think the example here is of course the American
Cancer Society. They have done a really good job. First of all, the
word "cancer" is great in a money-recruiting way, right? It’s an awful
disease. The second thing is the word "survivor" is really good. And
the third thing they do is they create an incredible fear from cancer. I
mean, the truth is, we all have lots of cancer and we all usually get
over it, I mean, some, some people of course, don’t, but in our
lifetime, we all have cancerous cells and in most cases it will be just
part of the deal of living, but they create this really negative
association that now everybody who had cancer, even if it was not
malignant and will not cause them to die or it was so slow it will take
50 years to develop... they call everybody a cancer survivor. And
because of that, everybody who knows them and everybody who cares about
them starts caring about cancer.

Now, you know, it’s kind of
interesting because they have basically have mastered this issue,
right? They’ve mastered making it central, focal... created very strong
fear about cancer. And caring about it and they basically get a lot of
money. And if you look at them as a not-for-profit, they’re an
incredibly wealthy not-for-profit. In fact, the other not-for-profits
feel that the Cancer Society is getting so much money, that people just
don’t give to other causes because they give so much to that cause and
now there’s all kinds of movements to basically stop their status as a
not-for-profit because they’re so wealthy and they spend so much money
on salaries and so on. But in a sense of understanding human
psychology, they’re the top, basically.Recorded on June 1, 2010Interviewed by David Hirschman